In ‘Extremely Rare’ Case, Rock Springs Woman Charged With Making Child Porn

It is “extremely rare,” authorities say, but a Wyoming woman is facing child pornography charges in Sweetwater County’s felony court.

Jaycee Morgan Cherny, 29, of Rock Springs, is scheduled to give a plea Monday to one count of child porn manufacture, another of child porn delivery and a third of child porn possession.

The first two counts carry a potential penalty of between five and 12 years in prison and $10,000 in fines, while the third is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and up to $10,000 in fines.

Sweetwater County Deputy Attorney Steven Anselmi-Stith charged Cherny late last month.

‘Extremely Rare’

It is “extremely rare” to see females charged with child pornography, said Ryan Hieb, commander of the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation’s Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force.  

In his 11 years with ICAC, he’s only overseen one case involving a female: that of Jessica Lynn Dierking, who was sentenced to federal prison in 2020.

Dierking befriended a man in prison in another state and produced the child sex abuse files at his direction, Hieb recalled.

He knew of another female charged before his ICAC tenure, and said her circumstances were similar.

“Kind of the same scenario,” Hieb recalled. “(It was) at the direction of another male, but she was involved in the production.”

The ratio of male to female case defendants for child pornography in Wyoming is probably at least 99.5% males, less than half a percentage of females, said Hieb.  

He noted that he doesn’t know the particulars of Cherny’s case. That one was investigated by Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Detective Matt Wharton.

And In Sweetwater

Wharton is the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s in-house assigned task force member to DCI’s ICAC, sheriff’s spokesman Jason Mower told Cowboy State Daily in a Thursday email.

In Sweetwater County, roughly 99% of criminal child pornography suspects are male, Mower related from a discussion with Wharton.

However, perpetrators depicted in those photos and videos are only 75% male and 25% female in Wharton’s experience, said Mower.

Court Documents Say …

The evidentiary affidavit in Cherny’s case, compiled from the notes of Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Deputy Dakota Carlsen, doesn’t go into detail on what drew law enforcement to suspect her in the first place.

Elsewhere in her court file, however, documents note that Cherny was in and out of jail on a case accusing her of child endangerment for methamphetamine exposure, and smuggling meth into a jail using a genital orifice, among other allegations.  

Carlsen applied for a search warrant for Cherny’s phone on April 15, and Rock Springs Circuit Court Judge John Prokos granted that, the document says.

Wharton used a data acquisition system, which unearthed photographs and videos that the phone indicated were sent through a messenger application in February, wrote Carlsen.

Wharton’s extraction revealed three photographs and seven videos of interest.

Carlsen described at least two of those as alleged child sexual abuse material involving a prepubescent boy with his nude bottom region exposed in what the camera framing indicated was not a selfie-shot photo — and other sexual circumstances involved.

Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.